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  He brushed aside her brief protest impatiently, his interest, as she suspected, impersonal. Td have the same concern for anyone practically just out of a hospital bed. You have an altogether too fragile look about you. I wanted you to spend the night in Alice, remember?'

  'Yes, I know,' she murmured evasively, 'but I must get back to Graham.' She didn't add this was only one of the reasons she had been reluctant to stay in Alice. Wade was a stranger, he had changed. While, she, in many respects, felt not much different from the vulnerable eighteen-year-old he had married. She had been frightened he might have asked her to share a bedroom, that he might have forced her to do so if she had refused.

  Wade sighed, as if clamping down on some impatience. 'Graham's okay. I've checked.'

  'So you've already told me,' she retorted fretfully. 'You keep on saying everything is fine, but you'd take Graham away from me, if you could, with the same emotion you feel when you wean one of your thousands of poor calves!'

  He turned to look at her again, his eyes glinting with anger. If he exercised a certain control, it obviously didn't come too easily. 'You'd better relax,' he rejoined coldly. 'I don't think this kind of talk's going to get you very far. You talk of wanting to keep your son, but if you don't let up you'll never be fit enough again to even look after yourself.'

  Vicki threw him a sullen glance, tears stinging the backs of her eyes. Hadn't he always excelled when it came to dishing out advice! His imperious manner never allowed one to imagine he could ever be wrong. Unwillingly her eyes clung to the hard, handsome length of him, to the lean, well shaped hands on the controls. How well she remembered those same hands on her body, controlling and directing her young, feverish passion, so that her desire might ultimately reach the same heights as his.

  Swallowing convulsively, she looked quickly away from his hands, back to his broad shoulders: He must be a lot cooler than she was, in his short-sleeved shirt. Quietly she slid out of the little blouson she wore. It was much hotter here than in Melbourne and the jacket felt heavy. She ignored Wade's frowning glance. There had been, or there seemed to have been, a flicker of renewed interest in it since he had met her that morning. She realised, when he had first seen her again, over a week ago, she had probably appeared even plainer than he remembered. Now, in the slim-fitting pants and brief top which Madame Sorelle had in eluded in the clothes Wade had bought, Vicki knew he was faintly intrigued by the difference. Rather nervously she wondered what he would think of her hair. Eventually, at the hospital, they had washed it for her, restoring it to its former glory. Then, for no clear reason she could think of, she had asked a nurse to purchase a silky scarf, with which to conceal it from Wade's eyes. It might seem illogical, but she wanted to surprise him. All because she seemed to remember either Wade or his grandfather doubting it had ever been fair at all!

  Madame Sorelle, Vicki recalled, had always been delighted with it. No doubt she, too, would have been displeased, had she seen it during the time she had been ill. After Graham had been born, and she had found work in Madame Sorelle's office, she had, one day, sighed ruefully about being plain.

  Madame, with her sharp ears, had overheard and thrown up her hands in protest. 'Plain?' she had cried. 'My dear child, just put yourself in my hands and I will make you quite lovely! Such good bones, ma chere, such wonderful clean lines. Those eyes, that skin, your hair! Right now you may look a little plain because you haven't learnt how to make the most of yourself, but you could be remarkable, cherie, with just a little effort.', Vicki, feeling too drained to care much what happened to her, had let Madame have her way, although she had never thought herself to be as pretty as Madame was fond of making out. Because she had been terrified of being recognised, she had always refused to work in Madame's salon. Only occasionally, when they had been short-staffed, had she agreed to help out. It was then she had seen the admiring glances of the husbands and brothers of Madame's wealthy clientele, had received invitations from several men, as well as promises of their serious intentions. All had been turned down because of her love for a small boy. Or had it also had something to do with Wade? Unhappily Vicki stared at her husband, attempting to disregard her traitorous pulse. It couldn't have been because she still loved him. It had surely only been that she had wished for no complications which might adversely affect her custody of Graham in the event of a divorce.

  Wade, as if conscious of her despairing glance, met it. He stared straight into her eyes, then appeared to study her mouth. 'You're different,' he commented.

  'I've always been on the thin side.' She wasn't sure, but she felt he must be speaking of her looks. 'You said so the first time you saw me.'' -

  From the corner of her eye, as she glanced away, she saw his mouth tighten, as if there were some things he would rather forget. 'Sure, you were then,' he drawled, 'but not all over. At least you weren't when you left.'

  Feeling her cheeks flush a dull red, Vicki closed her eyes. Let him think she slept. But, even when she couldn't see him, he still seemed able to torment her.

  Pictures flashed across her unwilling mind, all bound up with the semi-arid land over which they were travelling. There was the first time she had set foot on Baccaroo, the events leading up to it.

  Two years previous to that, at sixteen, she had emigrated from England with her parents. When she was seventeen both her parents had been lost, touring the desert-like country in Southern Australia. There had been a build-up of circumstances, but tragedy might have been averted if they had taken sensible precautions. As it was Vicki had been left an orphan, with no money behind her, her father having just begun to re-establish himself as an architect.

  Vicki could type, but this was about all. When the agency had told her of a job going at Baccaroo, a cattle station in the Northern Territory, near the Barkly Tableland, she had taken it immediately. Hadn't it seemed to fit her exactly? A wealthy pastoral family wanted a companion of Vicki's age for a girl, a seventeen-year-old relation, for about three months. Some typing experience would be useful, they had stipulated, for dealing with various things connected with the domestic side of the station, which the general office considered a nuisance. They required someone well spoken, quiet—and plain. Only Vicki hadn't known of the last condition until after she had arrived.

  A few days later she had been on her way, relieved to escape from Canberra, Australia's capital, where she and her parents had been so happy. In the kindest possible way people had advised her to return to England, but she had had no one to go to there. Not that she told anyone this. Imaginary relatives could be better than none at all. Not even to the McLeods, after she had arrived, had she confessed to being absolutely alone in the world. Besides, Australia had become her adopted country and already she was fond of it.

  The Australia she had known in the two years or so she had lived there seemed to Vicki all sunshine and light, the people mostly lighthearted and happy, but she had found a different atmosphere at Baccaroo. Almost as soon as she stepped over the threshold of the plain but substantial house she had known something was wrong.

  Wade's grandfather had been there to meet her, old Graham McLeod, known to everyone, she soon learnt, as the Old Man. He had been waiting to introduce her to the pretty young distant relation whose companion she was to be for one long vacation. Until her parents sent for her. They had welcomed her pleasantly, Old Man McLeod even approvingly. Vicki realised later this was because she looked very ordinary.

  Wade, that day, had appeared briefly in the background, a tall, tight-lipped figure who had scarcely spared her a second glance. Even on that first occasion he had made her heart race with a curious awareness and she hadn't been too young to realise that, though he was grim, he was attractive. He was a man to make any woman wish she was beautiful, but his eyes had merely been mocking as he had turned away.

  Vicki had bitten her lip, momentarily diverted from the Old Man's gruff mutterings. It was scarcely the time to become conscious of her own shortcomings, but she had been keen
ly resentful that Wade McLeod, with a single glance, had made her bitterly aware she was less than perfect. She was of medium height and thin, her eyes, her best feature, huge and still deeply shadowed with pain through the loss of her father and mother. Her hair, on the advice of those familiar with the heat of the Territory, was cut too short. This, and its soft fairness, had made her look like a boy, a very young boy at that!

  In spite of her doubts, Vicki had survived that first confrontation even if her initial bewilderment over Baccaroo remained. It had been something in the atmosphere. The house should have been pleasant, with its dull but spacious rooms, the wide verandahs, through which it was possible to walk on to lawns kept green by what methods she never knew, but the feeling that something was wrong was one she never got rid of. It wasn't until she had learnt a few of Baccaroo's grim secrets that she began to understand. 'Asleep?'

  The voice of her husband jerked her from her half dreaming state, but she turned her head sharply, not wishing him to see she recalled other times he had asked the same question. On one or two nights long ago. His voice hadn't been curt, as it was now; it had been deep and intimate, almost as urgent as his breath against her warm cheek.

  'No!' With a little, gasp she came upright. She scarcely realised that her reply, this afternoon, was the same as it had been then. Only then it had been laced with an incredibly eager yearning.

  'Look down,' Wade commanded, and when she complied, 'do you see where you are now?'

  The big jets flew so high that one part of the world seemed very much like another, but from a smaller plane it was easy to pick out individual details. She could see they were passing over the Barkly Highway, which joined the Stuart Highway north of Tennant Creek. Before them stretched the Barkly Tableland- where Wade and his grandfather owned some of their thousands of acres.

  Nervously Vicki closed her eyes, never having expected to be so overwhelmed by such a sense of homecoming. Since she had left it she knew she could never honestly deny there hadn't been a single day when she hadn't thought of Baccaroo, but she had never been prepared for such an extravagant surge of delight. For all she felt only like tumbling into bed and resting her tired body for a hundred years, to gaze down on all that red, endless space was like coming alive again. She had lived here for something less than a year, yet she had come to love it. The wide, almost featureless plains, covered by acacia scrub and low eucalypt, the semi-desert grasses. The outback, -the emptiness, the unbroken horizons, the wide, wide skies. The heat, the lack of water. It wasn't so much lack of water, she remembered, as lack of rain. The big bores coped with the former admirably, but they couldn't supply the rain which made the grass grow for stock. It was a hard life, so hard that only graziers like the McLeods survived. They might make their millions, but survival here was an endless struggle against the elements. Yet it had broken her heart to leave it, just over four years ago, when Wade had told her to get out and never come back.

  'Yes,' she whispered, unaware, as she looked at him, that her eyes were full of tears, I know where we are now. We'll soon be home ...' She spoke the word slowly, her tongue curling around it softy, unconsciously revealing. Then she stiffened. 'But it won't be like Melbourne, where the people in hospital had no reason to suspect we were anything but a normal married couple. What do you intend telling everyone, Wade?'

  His face hardened, and she knew she had been a fool to imagine he felt he had to account to anyone but himself. He was a grazier, part owner of what, to Vicki, seemed almost half the universe. A pastoralist who reared cattie on a huge holding was considered superior, the privileged squatocracy. It could only breed arrogance, and this Wade had in abundance—this she had learnt the hard way! That he had other traits, such as brains and brawn, a -powerful ability to command and, at the same time, work with his men, Vicki chose to forget. When she had been eighteen she had looked on him as a kind of god and loved him with a kind of awestruck reverence. Now she wasn't sure what was where that love had been. There was still awareness, an almost painful sensation in her breast each time she looked at him, but not like anything she had known before. She was vaguely conscious of something different being born inside her, but nothing she could come to terms with yet.

  What Wade said next didn't surprise her. 'We don't have to explain anything.'

  Not at all convinced, Vicki frowned anxiously. 'But what about all the people on the station? You used to employ an awful lot.'

  'So?'

  'How do you mean—so?' she very nearly screamed at him, her nerves taut, the dignity of her additional years almost forgotten. I have to be considered now, haven't I? I'm not a young girl any more, to be used for your own convenience and treated as though I didn't matter!'

  'If I recall,' he jeered, 'you didn't object much to the Way I used to treat you. You might still have been here yet, quite content with your lot, but for your own stupidity.'

  A knife went through her, cutting and searing until she could have writhed with pain. Her face went white and strained and though she made herself speak she felt more like moaning. 'You had to bring that up, I suppose, but that wasn't what I was talking about.'

  'No,' he agreed, his tone resuming normal, his eyes straight ahead, 'but you could try making yourself clear.'

  'I know it may sound silly, but I feel slightly nervous,' she faltered.

  'Four years ago you were nervous all the time. Now you surprise me.'

  'Why?'

  'I'm not sure yet,' his voice was no harder than his slanting glance and just about as forgiving. I told you I thought you'd changed. What I have to discover is whether you've done it yourself or with the aid of some man. Maybe more than one?'

  'Wade McLeod,' said Vicki, very coolly and levelly— she was feeling far from both but pressed back on her scalding anger. 'Mr. McLeod,' she repeated foolishly, 'if you weren't-flying this plane I'd try to hit you!'

  This threat he disregarded with devilish irony. 'You' were learning fast when you left me. Don't ask me to believe you've had all that tender young passion on ice for four years!'

  You can believe what the—what you like!' she burst out, clenching her hands into balls of fury. The hurt reappeared, that he could remind her. 'I refuse to continue such a degrading conversation.- As far as passion goes I don't want anything more to do with it, but whatever I do in future, Wade McLeod, it's my own business.'

  'Not while you're still using my name.' His mouth set like a clamp, he stared at her.

  'I can do that,' she took a bracing breath, 'even after we're divorced.'

  'We aren't, yet.'

  'So I must take warning?' Bitterly she wondered where all the pleasure of her homecoming had gone. She felt ill again—overcome by weakness. Knowing her own limitations when it came to sparring with Wade, she breathed deeply. 'Just tell me,' she pleaded, 'what I have to say to people about my absence?'

  'Nothing,' he replied curtly. 'It's not exactly news, after all. They've probably given up conjecturing long ago. I assure you no one will tackle you about it, not unless you continue to call me Mr. McLeod. That might really get them going again.'

  'So there was talk when I left?'

  'Nothing which wasn't easily dismissed.'

  Vicki wondered how, her eyes darkening with bewilderment, a certain unhappy resignation, 'I. expect you feel I ought to be grateful?'

  'Well now, my little pommy,' he mocked, 'I was never aware that gratitude was one of your more admirable traits. From you I expect nothing. Most things in the past that I had from you I had to take.'

  Drawing a ragged breath, she fought for control. She could comment on that, if she hadn't suspected he was deliberately provoking her. 'You make it difficult for a woman to express any appreciation.'

  He sighed dryly. 'You talk of a woman as if you referred to yourself. If so you must have changed. You were never responsible enough.'

  'Maybe I have,' she muttered bleakly, knowing instinctively that he was reminding her cruelly of the morning he had discovered she was ex
pecting Graham. Among other things, he had thrown that at her. Was his mind still so warped, still engrossed with old hatreds? Her heart sank despondently. What might she not have to protect Graham from? It could be a blessing he was too young to understand such things.

  When she fell silent he said, at last, tersely, 'Observe the priorities and leave the rest to me. You don't have to worry,'

  They were approaching the station. Far away to the left she could see the homestead, the sheds, the stock pens, the staff quarters. Time seemed to push up against her, growing terribly short. 'Wade,' she asked, her voice suddenly urgent, 'has nothing changed between your grandfather and you?'

  ·No.'

  Staring at his closed up face, she knew better than to pursue the matter further.

  As if conscious of her apprehensive regard and wishing to build on it, he turned his dark gaze to her blue one. 'Don't you think you've pressed your luck far enough for one day?' he suggested grimly.

  'Yes.' She wrenched her eyes from his and it took more effort than she cared to think about. She had wanted to discuss sleeping arrangements, that kind of thing, before they reached the house, but he was warning her that he wasn't prepared to listen. She must gather strength to approach him later. There were some things, he must realise, which couldn't be postponed indefinitely. One thing for sure—she would refuse to sleep within a hundred yards of him! "

  When they came down on die airstrip a utility was waiting, so she guessed Wade must have let them know when to expect him. Tears sprang to her eyes as she mutely allowed Wade to help her from the plane. It had been like that first time. Only then it had been Wade's overseer, Jeff Curry, who had brought her from Alice. On that day there had been none of the personal touch from the hierarchy, but she knew which hurt most.

  Wade eyed the silk scarf still tied, gipsy-like, around her head, as if he felt a sudden necessity to keep to the mundane. 'There's a lot of dust, so perhaps it's just as well you have that thing on, although I'm beginning to wonder if you're thinking of sleeping in it.'